by Bella Stumbo
And he hired a housekeeper.
Betty's shock was total. Even now, she hasn't recovered from the insult. The sonofabitch had simply replaced her.
Chapter 10
Crazy Days
Dan Broderick was not cut out to be a single father. But, as Kim said later during the trials, "Dad tried. But he just didn't know what to do with four kids. We ate a lot of steak and Idaho spuds for a while."
At the same time, he bought furniture, redecorated the interior of Coral Reef, and redid the landscaping. He later said he was only trying to make the house livable for Betty and the children. Even then, he said, he still expected Betty to come to her senses and move back into the family home with the children. It was only natural. He planned to move to a condo. He also insisted that he tried to consult Betty on the new decorations, but she wouldn't discuss them. Betty says he never made any effort whatsoever to contact her.
Either way, one day in June, she walked into the house to discover his new decor. "I couldn't believe it! He had ruined my house that I had worked so hard to make beautiful. He put in this yukky wallpaper and flooring, and he tore out mature landscaping and put in fifty-cent marigolds. He destroyed my house!"
She picked up a can of black Rust-Oleum paint and sprayed several walls. She walked from one room to the other, spraying. "I wanted to ruin it," she said. Later, in moments of wry humor, she would refer to the paint incident as "the beginning of 'my fits.'"
It would not be her last attack on the Coral Reef house, not by a long shot—but it would be the last one Dan Broderick tolerated.
Meantime, the Crazy Betty scenario was already taking seed at luncheon tables all over La Jolla. Her best friends thought she was nuts, still defying the truth. When she told them that Dan was coming back home, that divorce had never even been discussed, they could only raise their eyebrows and frown and feel pity. Poor Betty.
"Betty just went crazy from the day Dan left. All the things that happened later, the legal things, the money—it had nothing to do with her state of mind. It happened overnight. The minute he left her, she was a different person," says her old friend Candy Westbrook. "You literally couldn't ask Betty about the weather without her finding a way to bring the conversation back to Dan and Linda. It's all she would talk about. She just didn't want it to be."
Another of Betty's friends, Lynn McGuire, wife of an attorney friend of Dan's, was so concerned about Betty's mental health that she tried to persuade her to check into a mental health facility. Betty, who could never directly say no to anybody, humored her, but kept putting her off, while, inside, she wept and raged. Why did everyone think she was crazy? Because she was angry? Why didn't she have a right to be angry?
Dan's friends, meantime, had also shifted the focus from Dan and Linda's affair to Betty Broderick's fragile state of mind. The reason Dan could not be honest with Betty, they said in chorus after his death, was because he was so worried about her mental health. He simply didn't know what was the most compassionate course of action. In a word, he was trying to protect his poor, crazed wife, who had, up to that point, done nothing more impetuous than burn his clothes for lying to her and spray-paint the walls of her own house. No one ever seemed to take her earlier suicide attempt very seriously.
By 1985, Linda Kolkena, especially, was telling everyone what a wild woman Betty Broderick was—how she had tormented Dan for all of their marriage, vandalized their house, and, most recently, even abandoned her own children. Linda may have been just another young woman in love—but she was evidently also one without compassion for an older woman she had never even met, whose life was going down the drain. All Linda knew about Betty Broderick was what Dan had told her—here was a harpy asking for all that she got—and she accepted that.
But Linda at least stood for honesty, even if Dan didn't. Just as she had wanted Dan to leave his wife at the beginning of their affair years earlier, now she also begged him, friends say, to tell Betty that he was never coming back home.
But Dan wouldn't. Instead, he now chose to keep two massive deceptions going at once: he would neither tell Betty flatly that he was involved with another woman, nor that the idea of divorce had crossed his mind. Maybe he was afraid, maybe he was just undecided. Maybe the ghosts of his Catholic upbringing crippled him. In any event, he treated his wife of sixteen years with less honesty than he might have accorded a stranger.
By the time the June lease at La Jolla Shores expired, Betty had found a $650,000 house in the same area, on Calle del Cielo, one of La Jolla's prettiest hillside streets. The house was large, and it needed major repairs, but it was worth the price because of the location. She and Dan had once looked at it together.
The down payment was $140,000. Dan advanced the money to her without hesitation. He would, of course, collect it back in full nearly four years later from her share of community property in the divorce settlement, but, at the time, Betty only took it as further evidence of his commitment to their future together. She told her friends that the house was a "tear-down," and that she and Dan would soon be building a fabulous new home upon the site.
A few weeks later, she moved into her new house alone. Instead of taking any furniture with her, she shipped nearly everything in the rental back to Coral Reef, where her husband and children were. Why did she need furniture, she asked her friends brightly, when the whole house would soon be razed? For the next many months, Betty Broderick lived in her new house with its wonderful view and splendid neighborhood without even a bed, sleeping on the floor instead.
According to Dan, there was no reason for this deprivation. Even if he hadn't told her about Linda, even if he hadn't mentioned divorce, he insisted later in divorce court that he had at least clearly told her by now that he was not moving into the del Cielo house with her.
"She asked me if I would live there, and I said, 'No, Bets. We are not going to live together anymore’ …" But, he said, she would act "as if I didn't open my mouth," and say to him instead, "We'll put a second story on it and we will do this and we will do that." He says he told her, "Bets, you are not listening to me. I am not going to move into this house."
Betty says he lied. "He never told me that he was leaving me for good. Why else would I have moved into a house as big as [del Cielo] by myself?" she asks, appealing to logic. "Dummy me, I still thought I was shopping for a family home, because that's what he told me!"
Somebody obviously was either lying or not listening. In any case, whatever Dan told Betty, he clearly didn't say it well enough for her to comprehend. If the Brodericks hadn't communicated well before, now they could barely hear each other at all, short of landmine explosions.
Within the next month, Dan began to treat Betty as if she had never existed, either as a wife or a mother. He made every decision relevant to them both, and their children, without consulting her.
That summer, for example, he did not inform her when he decided to send their two young sons to a therapist—and not just any therapist either. Child psychologist Dr. Steven Sparta was also one of the best-known expert witnesses in custody disputes in the San Diego court system.
The insult staggered her. "I was furious. Why were my children being subjected to a psychologist, being treated as if they needed help? Help for what? Adjusting to their father's whore? Adjusting to the loss of their mother?"
But even then Betty remained as trusting as a slow-witted child. She could not understand that she was about to be divorced, and worse. Not unless Dan told her so.
On Father's Day, in yet another show of hopeful blindness, she made reservations for Dan and the children at one of their favorite restaurants and sent a rented limousine to fetch them at Coral Reef. The children later told her they all had a nice evening. But Dan didn't even call to thank her.
Then, in July, in his harshest blow so far, he sent their four children to their usual summer camps—but with orders that they be kept for an extended period "because I wanted to get them out of the middle of this," he said
in the divorce trial. Then, after camp, he sent them to visit his parents in Ohio—with instructions that they limit the children's telephone contact with Betty. Compounding her shock, Dan didn't even name her as the next of kin on her children's camp records. Instead, he listed his brother Larry.
Any mother can probably relate to Betty Broderick's amazed rage. How dare he? She and Dan were still married, not even legally separated. Her children were living with their father in a house in both their names. So how could he unilaterally block her contact with them? What crime had she committed, beyond spraying paint on the walls of her own house? What entitled Dan Broderick to arbitrarily deny her contact with her own children, even in emergencies? Several times that summer, she called for her children at the summer house of Daniel and Yolanda Broderick in Ohio, only to be often told coldly that her children weren't available.
It was around about then that Betty Broderick's anger and hurt began to turn to pure hate.
Years later, in the divorce trial, only months before he died, Dan agreed that, in his anger, he had once more ignored his children's wishes. They were, he conceded, "very unhappy" about his decision to cut off their contact with their mother that summer. But he decided to act unilaterally, in their own best interests. "I admit I did that consciously … I made it difficult for you to have contact with the children," he told Betty in court, "because of the way you were handling this anger you felt toward me."
And just how was she handling her anger in those days? Betty asked him. Beyond once defacing her own house, she had not at that time committed a single punishable offense. What precisely had she done that so branded her as an unfit mother?
But the judge told her that she was haranguing the witness, so Dan never had to answer.
Despite her rising rage, Betty carried on with her life that summer. She was going to enjoy this brief period of freedom from mothering and housewifing, she told friends. Let Dan worry about the children for a while. Until he got over his fling, she was going to travel, she was going to have fun. And, in many ways, she did.
"Living alone, at the very beginning, before I got depressed, was the most luxurious thing I ever experienced," she once said. "I had never had a bathroom to myself in my life, ever. I had never slept in a bed alone in my entire adult life. I suddenly had a closet to myself—Dan Broderick had ninety-nine percent of our closet. I never could hang my clothes up. And I had peace and quiet. You know, living with four kids gets a little noisy. I listened to music and I cut my roses and I was me, me, me. Which is what they tell you to do—take care of yourself. So I treated myself to champagne and caviar and the most expensive chocolates and the most expensive coffee, and I served everything in the most gorgeous crystal, and I tried to pretend I was having fun, and for a little while, I did."
While the children were at summer camp, she also took a two-week vacation to British Columbia. Photographs from that trip show a beautiful, slender woman in skintight jeans, smiling confidently amid the brilliance of the famed Bouchard Gardens. A friend from that period remembers her as a woman who "seemed to be on top of everything … she had all sorts of interests, she wanted to go salmon fishing, she wanted to tour the city. There was nothing gloomy about her."
By then, too, Betty had met a handsome young man in La Jolla, Bradley Wright, with whom she would eventually have a sexual relationship, although she still has trouble admitting it. "Well, the first time, he practically raped me," she once snapped, embarrassed. Just like Dan. Translated, it only meant that Wright had to apply major pressure to persuade Betty Broderick to have intercourse with a second man on this earth.
But in the summer of 1985 Betty wasn't doing anything more with Brad Wright than cooking him dinner and allowing him to help her with "the boy jobs" around the house. She was still very much a married lady, after all. During her trip to Canada, in fact, she bought her husband "a real pretty tie." He sent it back.
Throughout these months, although Dan was paying the bills—the mortgage, the insurance premiums, the credit cards—she had no income beyond what he saw fit to send her. Traditionally, the Broderick family financial system worked in the simplest way: Betty spent whatever she wanted, and Dan paid. In addition, he also wrote her a monthly household allowance check from his business account, usually in the range of $4,000, which she used to pay for whatever items she couldn't charge, from gardeners to café tips.
In the months after he left, she relied mainly on credit cards. Sometimes he sent her checks, but, since he wouldn't talk to her on the phone, she never knew when they would arrive, or for how much. For the first time in her life, Betty Broderick had come face-to-face with her own dependency. She hadn't felt so helpless since she was twelve and had to ask her father for a dime for bubble gum.
She didn't know what to do about any of it.
But sure she did. She charged more and more, until, finally, her mushrooming bills got Dan Broderick's attention.
He came to see her one night in late August, evidently livid over her charges, which, he later said, were "just astronomical … literally thousands and thousands of dollars." He wanted to put her on a budget. He wanted her to start paying her own bills.
She was ready for him. No more sharp-tongued Miss Bitch. Now it was Miss Goody-Two-Shoes who awaited him. She looked good, she smelled good, she purred at him. Even today, Betty Broderick is a master of that people-pleasing personality mode, learned so long ago, with her father and the priests—a grown woman, batting her eyelashes, playing the helpless little girl. Most women know the strategy, but few perform the routine as well as Betty does.
Alas for her, Dan's mind was strictly on bucks that evening. Nor had he arrived in a spirit of either honesty or generosity. He had not come to tell her that he was in love with another woman and wanted a divorce, or that he was prepared to make amends by giving her the children, plus at least half of all that they owned so that she might continue to live the life they had mutually dreamed of, absent only the presence of Daniel T. Broderick III.
Instead, he sat at her kitchen table with a legal tablet and a calculator and worked out her financial requirements down to the last dime: $9,036 is what he decided her permanent monthly allowance should be. About half of that would go to meet her monthly mortgage; the rest would accommodate her living expenses. Since he was raising the children, he thought that should suffice nicely.
Yes, hon, she murmured to all that he suggested. She wasn't even paying attention to the numbers he was laying out that evening. Where, for instance, did the odd $36 come from? Instead, all she wanted was to please him, to be a vision of sweet reason. She wasn't a demanding woman. She was his wife and the mother of his children. He would see that. This would pass. She didn't even mention Linda Kolkena that evening. She was still dreaming. And he let her.
Not until later would it dawn on her that, compared to her former spending habits, she had just been hobbled. No more shopping binges at Saks, Neiman's. No more trips whenever and wherever she wanted. She had not even had the foresight to point out that her grocery bills were fully as large as his, since all four children were spending nearly as much time at her house as his.
Before he left that night, according to his later testimony, Dan told her that she was now financially on her own. "All right, now look, I am going to pay down all of your charge accounts," he told her, "but from now on, you are going to have to be responsible for your own credit card charges."
And, true to his word, the very next day, he promptly wrote each credit card company and said: "… It is all over now. I am not on these accounts anymore. We are separated … Now Elisabeth Anne Broderick is going to have to be responsible for paying these herself, not me."
Her September check arrived promptly, for $9,036.
Less than a month later, he filed for a divorce.
She still remembers her shock, the sick pit in her stomach the day the process server arrived with the papers. Never, she insists, had Dan Broderick even mentioned the word divorce to her. Now
, she could only sit in her house, gazing at the sea, and wondering why he didn't have the courage, or the decency, after 16 years of marriage and nine shared pregnancies, at least to tell her to her face that it was over. Why did the sonofabitch have to hide behind pages of legalese? Why did he have to divorce her by ambush?
Atop the shock of the divorce filing, it was also Betty Broderick's first school season without her children. Outside her front window she could see the neighborhood children in their crisp autumn plaids and shiny new loafers running down the sidewalks, their little school book packs bouncing, their eyes alive with excitement. Rhett was starting first grade today. She wondered what clothes he was wearing.
But she knew little Rhett wasn't happy that day. Both her sons had always made it clear to everyone that they wanted to live with their mother, not Dan. They told that to their friends, to Dan, to her, to every judge involved in the custody battle, and to their therapists. "I want to run away and kill myself. My heart is broken," Rhett once told a therapist, according to records.
Betty herself had no real life without her children. She missed them, she wanted them—but she would never back down. No money, no kids. She was a woman who had walked the gangplank in bravado, only to turn and discover herself cornered by the bayonets of her own stubbornness, and Dan's.
Her reaction was predictable: falling, she flailed ever more wildly.
One day in October when she came to visit her children at Coral Reef, she spotted a Boston cream pie on the kitchen counter.
She stared at it for several seconds. She was transfixed by it. "It was the shittiest little pie I've ever seen …" For years, ever since the first days of their marriage, she had been baking those pies for Dan. They were his favorite. Slowly, it dawned on her—this was not a housekeeper's pie. No housekeeper would think to make a Boston cream pie for Dan.
